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Assigning moral roles within the Second World War in Europe:National similarities, differences, and implications for group-levelmoral representations
Roger Giner-Sorolla,1 Denis Hilton,2 Hans-Peter Erb,3 Federica Durante,4 ChristineFlaßbeck,3 Eva F€ul€op,5 Silvia Mari,4 Neboj�sa Petrovi�c,6 Maciej Sekerdej,7 AnnaStudzinska,8 Linda J. Skitka,9 Anthony N. Washburn,9 and Anna Zadora101University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, 2University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France, 3Helmut Schmidt University,Hamburg, Germany, 4University of Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy, 5Peter Pazmany Catholic University, Budapest,Hungary, 6University of Belgrade, Beograd, Serbia, 7Jagiellonian University, Krakow,8University of Economics andHuman Sciences, Warsaw, Poland, 9University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA, 10University of Strasbourg,Strasbourg, France, and Campbell Institute, Itasca, IL, USA
The moral roles assigned to nations that took part in the Second World War cast a shadow over
contemporary international politics. To understand contemporary moral beliefs about the war, we took 11
mostly student samples from 9 nations that took part in the European theatre of war (total N = 1,427). Weasked respondents, in free and scaled listings, to identify the war’s heroes, villains, victims, and recipients
of help. Nations and individuals seen as heroes, victims, and villains could be readily identified by most
samples and showed both continuity and difference across nations. Most nations preferentially assigned
themselves hero and victim roles, and the two were correlated positively, showing ingroup favouritism
linked to victimhood. These findings show the importance of morality to contemporary views of the war
and suggest further directions for studying today’s political climate in Europe and elsewhere.
Keywords: history, morality, nations, stereotypes, World War 2.
When people across the world are asked to list the most
important events in world history, the Second World
War is still among the most frequently nominated (Liu
et al., 2005; Liu et al., 2009). This is especially true for
people in European countries (Choi, Liu, Mari &
Garber, unpublished data). Other international studies
have confirmed the importance of this conflict in views
of historical villains and heroes, with Hitler in particular
a predominant villain (Hanke et al., 2015). And in stud-
ies of significant historical events, attitudes toward
World War 2 have shown a special ability to predict
willingness to fight future wars (Bobowik et al., 2014;
Paez et al., 2008). That war, then, casts a long shadow
over popular views of history worldwide.
However, we also believe that beyond the war’s
importance, the moral roles assigned to its combatant
nations can reveal as many differences as similarities
among countries. For example, in Hanke et al. (2015), it
was not clear that Allied leaders such as Churchill and
Roosevelt were universally idolized, scoring near the
midpoint of a good-bad evaluation scale. Because views
of history often follow nation-specific charters (Hilton &
Liu, 2008; Liu & Hilton, 2005), it is possible that judg-
ments of the actors in World War 2 show dissent, rather
than consensus, among nations. To answer these ques-
tions, we carried out a study of respondents in nine
countries that historically took part in the European the-
atre of the war. We had reason to expect historically and
ideologically driven differences as well as consensus
among the respondent countries in the roles assigned to
the combatant nations, including one’s own. Also, by
looking at the relationships among the roles assigned to
each country, we were able to test whether moral type-
casting theory (Gray & Wegner, 2009) holds true when
the targets are nations, not persons.
Moral roles on the individual and nationallevel
Nations are a major form of group organization in his-
tory (Côt�e & Levine, 2002; Michaud, 1978). Lakoff(1991) proposes that a key metaphor in politics and
war casts nations as individual persons, so that the
traits and acts that characterize people also apply to
countries. Graphic art, for example, often personifies
countries in asiconic figures such as Uncle Sam,
Mother India, or France’s Marianne. And research on
Correspondence: Roger Giner-Sorolla, School of Psychology,University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT27NP, UK. E-mail:
Campbell Institute, Itasca, IL, USA.
Received 3 February 2020; accepted 7 November 2020.
© 2020 Asian Association of Social Psychology and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.
Asian Journal of Social Psychology (2020), ��, ��–�� DOI: 10.1111/ajsp.12450
bs_bs_bannerAsian Journal of Social Psychology
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6690-8842https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6690-8842https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6690-8842mailto:
“enemy images” originating in international relations
has shown that political rhetoric and the popular imagina-
tion often frame other groups in terms of specific images
corresponding to functional roles, which in turn relate to
distinctive combinations of status, power and goal com-
patibility (Alexander et al., 1999; Alexander et al., 2005;
Herrmann, Voss, Schooler & Ciarrochi, 1997).
While the roles described in image theory depend on
pragmatic concerns such as power, research confirms
morality as a primary dimension of group social pro-
cesses (for reviews, see Ellemers, Pagliaro & Barreto,
2013; Ellemers & van den Bos, 2012). Accordingly,
roles with an explicitly moral character have been pro-
posed as central elements of social representation.
Principally, these are the hero (person who acts with
good intentions), the villain (person who acts with evil
intentions), and the victim (person who is harmed, often
by a villain). For example, Propp (1968) identifies the
conflict between a hero and villain as essential to the
typical Russian folktale, wherein other roles such as
helpers or victims may figure. Klapp (1954) also identi-
fies the hero and the villain as archetypes commonly
used in socially controlling narratives. While it might be
possible to frame some of these roles in non-moral ways,
the evaluative implications in common language are
clear: A hero is seen as morally good, a villain as bad, a
victim as someone whose moral claim deserves a hear-
ing (Eden et al., 2015).
Nations, too, can be framed as heroes or villains. For
example, Wertsch’s analysis (2002) of the narrative tem-
plate pervading Russians’ view of their own history
involves a heroic response to a villainous invader, be it
the Mongols, French, or Germans. However, this tem-
plate also incorporates the victimization of the people at
the hands of the villainous invader, which provokes and
legitimizes the heroic rise of the Russian people. This
three-party representation of collectives as hero-victim-
villain commonly arises in lay perceptions of historical
and current events, whether the H1N1 epidemic
(Wagner-Egger et al., 2011), the September 11 attacks
(Anker, 2005), or Australian responses to nuclear testing
(Michel, 2003). A fourth role, the beneficiary or recipi-
ent of help, has also been identified in narratives, as a
somewhat negatively viewed status (Todorov, 2009).
Moral roles seem particularly important in present-day
narratives of the Second World War, which in turn often
illustrate moral absolutes in contemporary issues. Hitler
is readily nominated as the epitome of world-historical
villainy (Hanke et al., 2015), so that comparing a rhetor-
ical opponent to him has become a sarcastically com-
mented clich�e (Godwin, 2008). In recent controversiesover European cohesion and policy, talk of the war is
never far away, including the incongruous casting of the
European Union as the Nazi regime and Angela Merkel
as its F€uhrer (for many more examples, see Karner &Mertens, 2013). Examples of war heroes, villainous
Nazis, and victimized conquered peoples also abound in
cinematic representations of the war (McLaughlin &
Parry, 2006).
In this study, we sought to map and explain the
assignment of roles to different countries among contem-
porary samples at several generations’ remove from the
events of the war. Previous studies, as mentioned, looked
at heroes and villains, but not the victim and recipient
roles, nor did they systematically assess role assignment
to and between countries. Also, we tested competing
predictions about the relationships among morally rele-
vant roles in general, derived from two theories: narra-
tive theory, which draws on qualitative and interpretive
research on source texts, and moral typecasting, which
draws on experimental research in social cognition.
Descriptive findings: What can be expected
Similarity among countries due to objectiveagreement. It could be argued that the victory of theAllied cause over the Axis, and its vindication through
international institutions such as the United Nations
and the Nuremberg tribunals, have left the moral ter-
rain of the Second World War very clear. This view
would predict a common international narrative charter
of moral roles based on historical facts. Thus,
Germany, Italy, and Japan would be villains because
they started the war and because of their crimes
against humanity. The Allied nations would be heroes
in proportion to their contribution against the aggres-
sors, with the United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and
United States taking principal roles. Nations would be
seen as victims to the extent that they suffered occu-
pation or civilian deaths during the war, especially if
early defeat meant that their part in the fight was car-
ried out from exile or as partisans (e.g. France,
Poland). Finally, these victim nations might also be
classed as recipients of help if they received aid from
other countries in liberating their territory, or in recon-
structing after the war (e.g., the Marshall Plan).
Differences due to historical and contemporaryalignments. However, the theory that diverse nationshave diverse national charters (e.g., Hilton & Liu, 2008)
also implies that national narratives of the war differ in
role assignment. Thus, one might also predict meaning-
ful differences between countries in the roles theyascribe to other countries, as well as differences between
how countries see themselves and are seen externally.
These predictions of difference draw on historical
© 2020 Asian Association of Social Psychology and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.
2 Roger Giner-Sorolla et al.
experiences, as well as contemporary international align-
ments.
Differences in historical experience before and espe-
cially after the war might lead to different identifications
of other countries as heroes and villains. For example,
countries occupied by the Soviet Union after the war
might be more likely to give that state an important role,
given the massive contribution of the USSR to the war
effort in terms of troops deployed and casualties suf-
fered. By contrast, in the West, the role of the USSR is
often downplayed (Jordan, 2015; Tharoor, 2015), per-
haps because casting the USSR as the “hero” or even
“victim” during the war would have undermined the
fight against it as the “villain” in the Cold War.
Alignments and experiences in the latter part of the
20th century may also play a part in retrospective moral
narratives about World War 2. Countries in the Warsaw
Pact which offered resistance to Soviet control during
the Cold War, such as Hungary (1956), the Czech
Republic (as Czechoslovakia, 1968), or Poland (1980–1989), might be more inclined to cast the USSR as vil-
lain, despite its role in ending German occupation.
Indeed, it should be remembered that in 1939, Poland
was also invaded and ultimately partitioned by the
Soviet Union in cooperation with Nazi Germany.
A recurrent theme in historical memory studies, for
instance in the foundational writings of Halbwachs
(1941/1992), is that history often serves the needs of the
present society. In this vein, attitudes toward Russia, the
European Union (EU), and the NATO bloc led by the
United States can also influence views of the war.
Countries such as Belarus and Serbia (Konitzer, 2010)
have diplomatically aligned with Russia as a counter-
weight to NATO, whose bombing of Belgrade in the late
1990s further encouraged this alignment. By contrast,
East and Central European countries such as the Baltic
States, Ukraine, and Poland have opposed Russian inter-
ests (Braghiroli & Carta, 2009; Pew Research
Center, 2014). M€alksoo (2009) has specifically analysedthe dynamics of post-Communist historical memory of
World War 2 in Russia and Eastern Europe. In this anal-
ysis, a Western European narrative that focuses on
Germany and brushes past the USSR is challenged both
by new EU nations such as Poland, who wish to equalize
Soviet villainy with Nazi villainy in order to cement
their moral status in the bloc, and by Putin’s Russia and
its allies, who raise Soviet heroism to pre-eminence (cf.
Khapaeva, 2016). Evidently, the discrepant contempo-
rary political projects of nations in Western and Eastern
Europe also contribute to official historical role-building.
Differences due to group-based biases. Establishedbiases lead us to predict that citizens might overestimate
their own country’s role as hero and as victim, and
underestimate its role as villain and recipient. First,
heroic narratives of history are common in many nations
(Smith, 1999), while moralized glorification forms a part
of nationalistic ideology (Roccas et al., 2006). Citizens
tend to take positive but not negative events as reflective
of their own national disposition, e.g., helping but not
harming ethnic minorities during the Holocaust
(Bilewicz et al., 2017; Hirschberger et al., 2016) These
biases could explain why citizens would assign their
country a greater role as hero than other countries
would.
A parallel bias is to resist categorizing one’s own
country as a villain. In general, when confronted with
ingroup harmdoing, people tend to disengage cognitively
from ingroup misconduct cognitively and to rationalize
such behaviour (Bandura, 1999; Leidner &
Castano, 2012). Thus, individuals may evaluate the
ingroup’s wrongdoings more indulgently than those of
other groups (Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2008), favouring
the ingroup. One exception, however, is Germany, where
official policy and education have combined to resist the
adoption of heroic views of the Second World War, and
to promote the acknowledgement of the evil of the Nazi
regime (Barkan, 2001).
Previous research also indicates how national groups
develop different collective narratives of victimhood in
the same violent historical event. For instance, although
victimhood has connotations of weakness, it is often
claimed as desirable in a rhetorical way, as part of a col-
lective self-concept after or during a conflict, regardless
of real experience in the conflict (Noor et al., 2017). As
recently reviewed by Bilali and Vollhardt (2019), victim-
hood status may weaken ingroup agency (Shnabel &
Nadler, 2015). But on the other hand, it may lead to pos-
itive outcomes such as material reparation, third-party
support and sympathy, and a sense of moral superiority
(Bar-Tal et al., 2009). Even nations responsible for his-
toric injustices can strategically downplay the level of
harm inflicted and shift blame onto others by endorsing
beliefs of perpetual victimhood (that they are victims
throughout history; Vollhardt, 2015) or competitive vic-
timhood (that their victimization should be taken as seri-
ously or more seriously than other groups’; Noor
et al., 2012; Young & Sullivan, 2016). For example,
Hirschberger et al. (2016) show how narratives of vic-
timization in Hungary can undermine acknowledgement
of the country’s role as an Axis collaborator.
All things considered, the victim role might be
embraced for a variety of reasons. Modern citizens might
be particularly aware of their own country’s suffering
because of relevant family histories, education, and
media portrayals. Victimhood also plays a central part in
the collective narrative of countries that see themselves
as unfairly treated by history, such as Hungary (F€ul€op
© 2020 Asian Association of Social Psychology and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.
Second World War moral roles 3
et al., 2013; L�aszl�o, 2014). In this context such viewshave been shown to drive other defensive nationalistic
attitudes, such as opposition to helping refugees (Szab�oet al., 2020). Nations that uphold the Soviet legacy, such
as Russia or Belarus, also officially include in the narra-
tive of struggle reminders of sacrifice and victimhood
(Savchenko, 2009; Tumarkin, 1995). Finally, Germany
again might prove an exception and embrace victimhood
with less enthusiasm. Mentioning the victimization of
Germans during the war, e.g., by the Red Army or
Allied bombing, was seen as problematic in the post-war
era due to de-Nazification aims, leading to a cautious re-
engagement with the victim role in the 21st century
(Moeller, 2005).
Narrative versus typecasting views
In narrative analyses such as Wertsch’s (2002), the hero
and villain are opposed, such that nations cannot easily
fill both roles. This prediction would also seem to agree
with the theory of moral typecasting in person percep-tion (Gray & Wegner, 2009), in which assigning individ-
uals to one moral role makes it difficult to imagine them
in another. However, in moral typecasting, individuals’
roles are defined not just as helpful or harmful
(“benevolence”), but also by whether one is doing the
act (“agency”), or has it done to them (“patiency”). In
addition to the roles of “victim” (patient of evil) and
“hero” (agent of good), this theory includes the “villain”
(agent of evil) and “beneficiary” or “recipient” (patient
of good). Experiments in support of this theory have
found that agency overrides benevolence when forming
ideas of a person’s blameworthiness. For example, if a
person is a past victim of wrong, it is harder to blame
them for bad deeds they later perform, than to blame a
past hero who has previously done good deeds, because
of the common element of agency between good and
bad deeds (Gray & Wegner, 2009, 2011).
Moral typecasting, to our knowledge, has not yet been
applied to collective moral roles such as nations. Our
research thus tests the suitability of using moral type-
casting on a national level. Both the evidence and the
rationale for moral typecasting theory have been criti-
cized (Arico, 2012), but narrative theory analyses also
call into doubt its application to the national level. In a
narrative where a country is invaded, and then responds
through warfare, the same country plays the part of both
hero and victim. Thus, narrative theory organizes moral
roles on evaluative grounds, rather than by agency and
patiency, in line with the primacy of evaluation as a
semantic category more generally (Osgood et al., 1957).
Sympathetic roles (hero, victim) are related to each
other, and oppose negatively viewed roles (villain;
Todorov, 2009; Todorov & Golsan, 1998). Thus, while
narrative theory would predict that the hero and victim
role would be positively correlated across a variety of
target nations, moral typecasting would predict that vic-
tim (as patient of wrong) should be negatively correlated
with both hero (as agent of good) and villain (as agent
of wrong), because patient and agent are incompatible
roles.
Moral typecasting would also predict a negative corre-
lation between being seen as an agentic hero or villain,
and being seen as a recipient of good deeds, another
patient role. Recipient, in turn, would correlate positively
with victim status, a relationship that resonates with
many international situations in which aid is given in
response to, or in anticipation of, harm by a third party.
The role of the recipient, however, does not seem clear
in the mainly evaluative alignments of narrative theory.
It is inoffensive, but also implies weakness or an obliga-
tion, so might be ill-regarded (Todorov &
Golsan, 1998). In social research, too, receiving aid can
lead either to positive reactions, or negative ones,
depending on factors such as the stability of status rela-
tions and the way in which help is given (Gergen, 1974;
Halabi & Nadler, 2009). Thus, in predicting the corre-
lates of the novel role of recipient, typecasting theory
may provide the clearer expectation.
Table 1 gives a listing of the four main moral roles
and their definitions in the study.1
Scope and structure of the project
The present research focused on the war in Europe, due
to the genesis of this project in a European research net-
work. In a questionnaire, 11 samples from nine partici-
pant nations first answered open-ended questions asking
what nations or other entities in the war best fit the
descriptions of each of the main moral schemas.
Afterward, they answered directed, scaled questions
Table 1Summary of the Four Main Moral Roles
Moral
Role Description Given to Participants
Hero Someone with good intentions who acts on themeffectively
Villain Someone with evil intentions who acts on themeffectively
Victim Someone who is harmedRecipient Someone who is helped
1
The study also included two exploratory roles involving incompetence, buttheir definitions apparently were not fully understood by participants, so for thesake of clarity we focus reporting on the central, theoretically supported roles.
© 2020 Asian Association of Social Psychology and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.
4 Roger Giner-Sorolla et al.
asking how much each of eight target nations fit each of
the schemas in World War 2.
The eight target nations were chosen to represent the
three Axis powers in the Second World War (Germany,
Japan and Italy), and the five principal Allied nations
that fought in the European theatre, by population and
military capacity: France, Great Britain, Poland, the
USA and the USSR. For some participant nations, addi-
tional target countries were included to answer questions
of local interest, which are not part of this more general
analysis. As part of this, each sampled nation that was
not itself a target nation (i.e. Hungary and Serbia) was
included as a target in its own questionnaires only, with
the exception of Belarus.
The 11 participant nation samples were mainly univer-
sity students (Table 2); Poland and the USA were repre-
sented both by a student sample and a somewhat older
Internet sample. The nations were chosen to match the
target nations, excluding Japan; the USSR was repre-
sented by a sample from the former Soviet republic of
Belarus, which officially maintains an ideological conti-
nuity with the Soviet side in the war. We were also able
to obtain samples from two nations that fought in the
war, but are less widely recognized as combatants:
Hungary (which supported the Axis and sent troops to
fight the USSR) and Serbia (which as part of Yugoslavia
was invaded by the Axis, and sustained a partisan resis-
tance struggle afterwards, which helped to give birth to
the post-war Yugoslav state).
Hypotheses
Similarity and difference between countries. Thehypotheses that there would be a general reality-based
consensus about roles, but modified in places by differ-
ences between countries according to historic and current
alignments, was mainly tested by inferential statistical
tests carried out on the scaled endorsements, with a par-
ticular focus on which nations and roles showed differ-
ence.
Own-country differences. Each of our samples alsorated its own country’s roles in World War 2, allowing
us to compare national self-views to other countries’
views of the same nation. Based on historical facts
(membership in the Axis or the Allied nations; whether
or not the country was occupied by the Axis or the
USSR), one might expect absolute differences between
countries in the primary role ascribed to itself. But in
comparison to other nations’ views, a nation might see
itself more positively than others see it, in line with simi-
lar egocentric effects in group perception (Brewer, 2007)
and collective memory (Sahdra & Ross, 2007). Thus,
compared to how others see them, we expected that
nationals would see their country as greater heroes,
greater victims, lesser villains, and lesser recipients of
help, because obligation and dependency are generally
undesirable states.
How are moral roles generally structured?. Finally,the data structure we gathered allows multilevel analysis
of the relationships between scaled role ratings for dif-
ferent target countries among different participant popu-
lations. When looking at the correlations among
assignment of roles, typecasting theory would predict:
• Correlations between assignment of low-agencyVictim and Recipient roles to the same country (low
agency) should be positive,
• Correlations between high and low agency roles(Hero-Recipient, Villain-Victim, Hero-Victim, Villain-
Recipient) should be negative.
• Correlations between assignment of Hero and Villainroles to the same country should be weak or null, as
the roles’ opposed benevolence conflicts with their
shared high agency.
However, under the narrative-evaluative hypothesis
that valence will overshadow agency in the structuring
of roles because of the importance of conflict in under-
standing World War 2, then:
• Correlations between Hero and Villain roles should bestrongly negative.
• Hero and Victim roles should be positively correlated,because these are both seen sympathetically.
• As a potentially ambiguous role, inoffensive but alsosubservient, the Recipient should show low or null
correlations with the others.
Method
Participants
In each country we aimed to achieve a sample of at least
60 participants, which we deemed reasonable given the
largely within-participants design. For example, ANOVA
comparing the nine nationalities on any one measure
would have statistical power of 99.7% to find a medium
sized effect of f = .25; the Country 9 Role within-par-ticipants interaction for any one sample would have
power of 99.9% to find f = .25. Power analysis guideli-nes for multilevel analysis also spoke to the high power
of the design, with well over 80% power to detect even
a small effect (coefficient gamma ~= .10) when theoverall N of data points is 20,120, or 660 (participants)
© 2020 Asian Association of Social Psychology and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.
Second World War moral roles 5
9 32 (questions, 4 roles asked about 8 countries; Arend
& Sch€afer, 2019). In fact, most samples were larger thanthis target, leading to a very high statistical power.
Participants were mostly university students, although
two adult online samples were collected as well for
Poland and the USA, the Polish online sample being col-
lected as a snowball sample through e-mail and social
media, and the US sample through Amazon Mechanical
Turk. Student participants were recruited by various
means including filling out the questionnaire in class,
being approached on campus, or through distribution of
links to an online questionnaire. In all samples, partici-
pants gave informed consent and were debriefed about
the purpose of the study. Basic statistics for each sample
are given below (Table 2). Participants had to be nation-
als of the country in which they were sampled.
Materials and procedure
Questionnaire content was developed in English and
translated into the language of the sample by a native
speaker, then back-translated by a different bilingual
speaker, and checked with the first author, adjusting gaps
in meaning as needed.
All versions of the questionnaire included questions
on gender, age, nationality, student status, and degree
studied. Some samples, at the discretion of the
researcher, included other questions on topics unrelated
to the present hypotheses, such as self-rated knowledge
of World War 2, high school history education, and
political orientation; these will not be reported. We
otherwise report all measures and exclusions.
Open questions. First, participants read the followinginstructions:
People usually have some idea of certain events which
have occurred throughout history, even if they haven’t
lived through the period themselves, or remember lit-
tle from history lessons at school.
In this study, you will read a number of descriptions
and will then be required to write down a list of coun-
tries or individuals from a specific period in history
that you believe fit those descriptions. If you think a
country or individual fits multiple descriptions, you
may repeat them.
Please remember that there are no right or wrong
answers, and if you have no idea who could fit a
description then simply write “don’t know.”
The general prompt for each description was “Which
countries or individuals in World War 2 could be
described as [ROLE]? Write down up to 5.” The roles
were described, in order, using the exact textual descrip-
tions presented in Table 1.
Scaled questions. This section presented again the listof role descriptions and explained: “This task requires
you to circle a number on a scale stating to what extent
you believe specific countries fitted the descriptions
above during World War 2,” followed by a list of the
role labels.
A five-point scale was used with labels: “1: Nothing
to do with the profile, 2: Not a great example, 3: An OK
example, 4: Good example, 5: Perfect example.” One
question was asked about each of the roles in relation to
each of the eight target countries: Britain, the USA,
Germany, the Soviet Union (including Russia), France,
Poland, Italy, and Japan. The Hungarian sample asked
the same questions of Hungary, and the Serbian sample
asked the same questions of Serbia, Croatia, and
Yugoslavia.
Table 2Overview of Samples and Their Characteristics
Country Sample Type Median Age N M/F Year % Scale Items Degree (Major), If Student
United Kingdom Student 19 57 29/28 2013 12.3 All subjects
France Student 21 79 19/60 2014 11.1 Mostly psychology
Germany Student 23 65 17/46 2014 5.8 All subjects
Italy Student 22 125 28/97 2014 0.2 Mostly psychology
Serbia Student 22 119 86/33 2014 0 All subjects, including 60 history students
Hungary Student 22 134 61/73 2014 0 All subjects
Poland 1 Student 21 72 11/61 2014 0 All psychology
Poland 2 Online 29 252 109/143 2014 55.4
Belarus Student 19 95 41/54 2015 0 47 psychology, 48 history
United States 1 Student 20 159 60/97 2015 43.0 All subjects
United States 2 Online 32 270 154/116 2015 25.9
© 2020 Asian Association of Social Psychology and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.
6 Roger Giner-Sorolla et al.
Results
Open responses
The top five (by count) open responses for each role, in
each sample, were analysed by count. Each national site
researcher made decisions about which terms should be
considered synonymous (e.g., Britain = UK = UnitedKingdom; in some places popular understanding equates
the Soviet Union with Russia). Although the open
responses were not systematically analysed, these find-
ings generally corresponded to the scaled measures. For
example, the USSR was little mentioned in Western
countries, was the predominant hero in Serbia and
Belarus, but mentioned more as a villain in Poland and,
to a lesser extent, Hungary.
However, the open responses also showed recurrent
appearances of groups and individuals not included in
the scales. It is not surprising that, for example, well-
known leaders like Churchill should appear alongside
Britain, or Hitler alongside Germany. Beyond obvious
examples, individuals named in moral roles tended to be
of the same nationality as the respondent (e.g., Petain,
Mihailovi�c, Zhukov), reflecting greater familiarity withown-nation history. Some diversity also appeared in
Victim role responses, with frequent mentions of Jews
and other groups the Nazis targeted for extermination, as
well as a variety of smaller occupied countries. Jews
were also sometimes mentioned as recipients of help,
though never by a majority (e.g., in France, USA and
Poland).
Scaled responses
Subsample analyses. The Polish and USA contribu-tions each included both a student sample (early 20s)
and an online sample (around 30 years of age), with dif-
ferent rates of respondse. Nonetheless, these diverse
samples from the same nation revealed generally similar
patterns of responding in terms of the broad ranking of
means. To simplify analysis, the two samples from
Poland and the USA were combined, yielding nine dif-
ferent national samples. In samples which had students
taking different subjects (Serbia, Belarus), there were
also only minor differences between history and other
students that did not affect the overall patterns remarked
on below, which were reproduced in both subsamples.
Main analyses. Because samples varied in their rateof omitted responses (Table 2), we used multilevel anal-
ysis to include remaining responses even when partici-
pants left out some combinations of nation and role.
Scaled responses were subjected to a mixed model
analysis using the SPSS v23 MIXED procedure, with
participant ID (unique across samples) as a random vari-
able, with three factors distinguishing responses: 9 (sam-
ple, between) 9 8 (target nation, within) 9 4 (role,
within). The significance of effects was not of primary
importance. Indeed, all main and interaction effects were
significant, Fs > 17.47, p < .001, and the critical three-way interaction, F(168, 34,466) = 34.99, showed thatdifferent national samples had different patterns of
assigning roles to countries.
Of greater interest were the patterns of means, pre-
sented separately in Figures 1–8 by target country, sam-ple country and role. “Eastern” countries here are
defined as ex-Communist states (Belarus, Hungary,
Poland, Serbia) as opposed to “Western” ones.
Overall, the role of Recipient was not as strongly
assigned to countries as the other three. For example,
Hero, Victim, and Villain were often assigned to coun-
tries with means at or near 4 on the five-point scale,
indicating some degree of consensus within a sample on
that country’s role. Recipient never reached a mean of 4
in any sample and seldom reached a mean of 3. This
finding supports the applicability of narrative theory’s
central trio, showing the strong emergence of these roles
in views of the wartime nations.
To summarize these results, target nation by target
nation:
• The UK was primarily seen as a Hero of World War2 in all sampled countries, with strong secondary roles
as Victim and Recipient.
• The USA was generally seen as a Hero in Westerncountries and Poland, but had a more equivocal role
in other Eastern countries, and in Belarus the USA
was rated as the principal villain of the Second World
War—more even than Germany.
• Germany was principally seen as a Villain in all coun-tries except Belarus, where assignment of Germany to
any role was low.
• The USSR, importantly, showed the most discrepancyin evaluation. It was not strongly assigned any single
role in Western countries, whereas Eastern countries
were split, some seeing it strongly as Hero and Victim
(Serbia, Belarus) and others principally as Villain
(Hungary, Poland).
• France was seen nearly universally, if not strongly, tobe a Victim and Recipient to a similar degree.
• Poland was strongly identified as a Victim in all sam-ples.
• Italy was not strongly rated overall, but emerged pri-marily as a Villain.
• Japan was seen principally as a Villain, if not asstrongly as Germany, and Victim was a strong
© 2020 Asian Association of Social Psychology and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.
Second World War moral roles 7
secondary role, probably due to the use of the atomic
bomb.
This profile of results shows consensus on many role
assignments, but dissent between nations on others, in
particular the roles of the USSR and of the USA.
Own-country analysis
A multilevel analysis similar to the previous one was
also conducted, examining differences between samples
in how they saw their own nation’s role in the war, the
design being 9 (sample, between) 9 4 (role of own
nation). Two countries presented special issues in that
they had become independent from larger polities that
took part in the war: Serbia from Yugoslavia, and
Belarus from the USSR. In the Serbian case, the post-
Communist Yugoslav break-up found Serbia in a state of
war with other former republics, recapitulating civil
strife between nationalities and ideologies during World
War 2. Belarus, however, has generally shown a strong
sense of continuity with the USSR and good relations
with post-Soviet Russia. For this reason the “own coun-
try” of Serbia was defined as Serbia, but the “own coun-
try” of Belarus was defined as the USSR.
In the analysis, both main effects and the interaction
were highly significant, each F > 10.98, p < .001, indi-cating differences in national self-concept profile
between countries. We describe here each nation’s top
roles, as well as any roles assigned to the nation at a
scale-midpoint mean of 3 or higher.
• Britain saw itself as a Hero with lesser endorsementof Recipient and Victim status.
Figure 1 Mean scaled evaluations of the United Kingdom in World War 2, by sample nationality (x-axis group-ings) and role (colour-coded bars). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 2 Mean scaled evaluations of the United States in World War 2, by sample nationality (x-axis groupings)and role (colour-coded bars). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
© 2020 Asian Association of Social Psychology and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.
8 Roger Giner-Sorolla et al.
• France saw itself as Victim, then Hero, with Recipientin between and not different from either;
• Germany saw itself as Villain;• Italy showed mid-range endorsements of every role
except Hero;
• Serbia was primarily Victim, then Hero;• Hungary was primarily Victim;• Polish samples saw their country as primarily a
Victim, and secondarily as Hero;
• The USA saw itself exclusively as a Hero;• Belarus saw the USSR as a Hero, then a Victim, and
then a Recipient.
Comparisons between national self-images and other
samples’ rating of the nation in that same role showed a
number of biases (Table 3). Each nation except for the
former Axis nations of Germany and Italy saw itself as
more of a Hero than others saw them. Also, each nation
(even Germany) rated itself more highly on Victim sta-
tus than others saw it, except for Poland, which was
equally highly recognized by others as a Victim. The
USA and Belarus (as member of the former USSR) com-
plemented their high Hero roles with a low acceptance
of Villain status relative to others, while France gave
itself a higher but still low Villain rating, possibly due
to the recognition of Vichy collaboration. Recipient sta-
tus showed few differences.
General relations among roles
Finally, to investigate the relationships between roles,
we ran multilevel analysis on a restructured data set
Figure 3 Mean scaled evaluations of Germany in World War 2, by sample nationality (x-axis groupings) and role(colour-coded bars). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 4 Mean scaled evaluations of the Soviet Union in World War 2, by sample nationality (x-axis groupings)and role (colour-coded bars). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
© 2020 Asian Association of Social Psychology and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.
Second World War moral roles 9
where each case was the set of role ratings for a given
country and a given participant, and participant was
entered as a random level 2 variable, collapsing across
sample origin, using again the mixed model procedure in
SPSS version 23. This allowed us to extract a coefficient
for each relationship between a pair of roles, considering
all samples’ evaluations of all countries. The grid of
these coefficients is shown in Table 4.
The relationship between the four roles supported dif-
ferent elements of both the narrative and typecasting
hypotheses. Supporting typecasting against narrative, the
two patient roles, Victim and Recipient, were related
strongly, even though the narrative view holds that they
carry different evaluative implications. However, there
was a strong negative relationship between the two
agentic roles, Hero and Villain, which supports the nar-
rative account. Moreover, a heroic view of a country
was also associated positively with seeing it as a victim,
which supports the narrative account as well.
Discussion
National similarities and differences
This study showed clear and meaningful moral roles
assigned to the major European participants in World
War 2 among samples largely consisting of university
students, underscoring the importance of the conflict
even among those generationally far removed from it.
Some of the role assignments, in both the free-response
Figure 5 Mean scaled evaluations of France in World War 2, by sample nationality (x-axis groupings) and role(colour-coded bars). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 6 Mean scaled evaluations of Poland in World War 2, by sample nationality (x-axis groupings) and role(colour-coded bars). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
© 2020 Asian Association of Social Psychology and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.
10 Roger Giner-Sorolla et al.
and scaled measures, showed general agreement across
countries. Poland and France were seen as victims;
Germany was seen as a villain, even by Germans them-
selves; the UK was seen as a hero. These findings sug-
gest a common historical schema of World War 2,
guided by objective facts about the aggressors, defend-
ers, and occupied countries.
But perhaps more interesting were national disagree-
ments on roles, principally the Soviet Union, which can
be summed up in terms of East-West differences and
further divisions within Eastern countries. The USSR
took on no single predominant role in the eyes of
Western European countries (e.g., UK, USA, France).
This may reflect the ambiguous part that Stalin played
during the war, siding first with Hitler and then the
Western Allies before going back to enemy status in the
Cold War. It also connects to a general Western down-
playing of the Soviet role in the war. By contrast, the
USSR was important in the East, but controversial:
Some countries saw the USSR as more Villain than
Hero (Poland, Hungary) and some saw it as more Hero
than Villain (Serbia, Belarus). The divisions in the East
may reflect historical and contemporary attitudes toward
Russia, based in turn on post-war and Cold War experi-
ences, as discussed in the Introduction.
Symmetrically, the USA was seen as a hero of the
war in the Western countries, but played an ambiguous
role in Serbia and was rated as a principal villain in
Belarus. As explained previously, the alignment of
Serbia with Russian interests and its relatively recent
Figure 7 Mean scaled evaluations of Italy in World War 2, by sample nationality (x-axis groupings) and role (col-our-coded bars). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 8 Mean scaled evaluations of Japan in World War 2, by sample nationality (x-axis groupings) and role(colour-coded bars). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
© 2020 Asian Association of Social Psychology and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.
Second World War moral roles 11
punishment by NATO would make the role of the USA
more problematic there than elsewhere. The negative
view of the USA in Belarus also should not surprise
those familiar with popular and official views of history
there, promoting a continuity in narrative with the for-
mer USSR. Often, the USA, as leader of the Western
world, has been presented as an ideological enemy of
Belarus, one that wants to "steal" credit for the sacred
victory in the Great Patriotic War, i.e., World War 2
(Narotchnitskaya, 2008). This view is promoted
above all in school textbooks (Kovalenia, 2004;
Lukachenko, 2003). When Belarusians were asked to
explicitly rate the role of the USA in the war, then,
they may have focused on betrayal by a former ally as
a sign of villainy.
Own-country versus outside views
There were also clear differences in the roles national
respondents endorsed for their own countries. Some saw
themselves as heroes much more than victims—namely,the USA and Britain, two Allied countries that had not
been occupied. Germans, in line with their country’s
official diplomatic and educational policy
(Barkan, 2001), admitted responsibility as the principal
villain. French, Poles, and Serbians took on victimhood
with elements of heroism, while Belarusians saw their
role in the war as heroic with elements of victimhood.
These views accord with these countries’ history of inva-
sion, resistance, and liberation in the war. Indeed, the
relative self-views of these countries largely corre-
sponded in rank to other countries’ view of them, with
Belarus as an exception both for its negative view of the
USA and its positive view of the USSR.
However, general biases in self-views were also
found. In particular, national respondents relative to out-
side observers were more likely to cast themselves as
collective Heroes and Victims, two roles that for differ-
ent reasons are each desirable. This was true even when
other roles predominated for that nation’s respondents.
The extension of this pattern to Germany’s victim role
speaks to the effective lifting of a 20th century “taboo”
against commemorating German civilian victimhood.
Italy and Hungary, as partners in the Axis for whom a
heroic self-narrative might be difficult, present unique
cases that warrant further study. Italians showed no pre-
dominant role, and roughly equally saw themselves as
Villains, Victims, and Recipients. Further analyses on
this sample showed that these divergences depended on
ideological views, measured with political orientation,
where 1 = left, and 7 = right; left-wing Italians morestrongly endorsed the villain status of Italy (r = �.40, p< .001), whereas right-wing Italians more stronglyendorsed victim status (r = .23, p = .008). No significantcorrelations were found between political orientation and
the hero or recipient role. This analysis speaks to the lar-
ger literature on defensive reactions to collective harm,
Table 3Comparison of Own Nation versus Average OtherNation Ratings of the Nation’s Own Role, for AllFeasible Nations (i.e., Excluding Hungary and Serbia)
Hero Villain Victim Recipient
UK own 3.91* 1.82 3.02* 3.22UK other 3.35 1.72 2.57 2.97
FR own 3.22* 2.18* 3.80* 3.51FR other 2.49 1.70 3.25 3.34
GE own 1.62 4.08 2.59* 2.08GE other 1.52 4.31 2.19 1.90
IT own 1.75 3.13 2.96* 2.79*IT other 1.68 3.36 2.12 2.35
PL own 3.45* 1.26 4.46 2.98PL other 2.39 1.54* 4.36 3.21USA own 4.25* 1.71 2.49* 2.14USA other 3.12 2.41* 1.77 1.96Belarus/USSR own 4.77* 1.21 4.23* 3.70*Belarus/USSR other 2.62 3.08* 2.63 2.38
Note. Means with non-overlapping confidence intervals forcomparable own- and other-country ratings are marked with an
asterisk (*) by the higher mean.Bold fonts are used to highlight significant results along with
asterisks.
Table 4Bivariate Relationships Between Roles Collapsing Across All Samples (Multilevel Analysis)
Hero Villain Victim Recipient
Hero – �.379*** (.009) .305*** (.010) .281*** (.010)Villain �.454*** (.011) – �.244*** (.011) �.148*** (.012)Victim .313*** (.010) �.235*** (.009) – .505*** (.009)Recipient .251*** (.010) �.172*** (.009) .466*** (.009) –
Note. Columns are predictors, rows are outcomes. Unstandardized coefficients are shown, with standard errors in parentheses.*p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.
© 2020 Asian Association of Social Psychology and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.
12 Roger Giner-Sorolla et al.
and to the ideological implications of such national
biases.
In Hungary, the predominance of the Victim identity
in our study resonates with larger themes of collective
victimhood in Hungarian historical self-views and char-
ters that stretch back over the centuries (L�aszl�o, 2014).In Hungarian collective memory (L�aszl�o et al., 2002),the last positively evaluated events come from before
the medieval period. Later heroic events, e.g., victories
against the Ottoman Empire, Habsburg Empire, and
Soviet Union (1703, 1848, 1956), were always followed
by defeats and repression. The national failures of the
20th century (losing the two world wars, and suffering
under the Holocaust and Soviet domination) also helped
a sense of collective victimhood to become an integral
part of the Hungarian national identity. As we have seen
(Szab�o et al., 2020), the victim identity in its exclusiveform (Noor et al., 2017) promotes in this case a with-
holding of charity to other victimized peoples, and can
inhibit acknowledging the collaborator status of the
Hungarian government with the Nazis (Hirschberger
et al., 2016).
Relationships among moral roles
Supporting narrative theory over typecasting, countries
endorsed as heroes were overall more likely to beendorsed as victims, and less likely to be endorsed asvillains. The hero-villain dichotomy this result supported
seems basic to a collective, moralized, oppositional situ-
ation of war. The hero-victim correspondence is also
understandable within a view of nations that subsumes
both civilians and fighters. Even though it may be diffi-
cult for an individual to be seen as both hero and victim,
it is normal for a nation to contain both individual her-oes and victims. Many countries, in and beyond World
War 2, tell a story in which they are the victims of an
unprovoked attack who then heroically fought back
(Banjeglav, 2012; Rouhana & Bar-Tal, 1998), a
sequence also central to Wertsch’s (2002) analysis of the
Russian national story across history. Therefore, adjust-
ments to moral typecasting theory are necessary at a col-
lective level.
However, our results also suggest that Todorov’s char-
acterization of the recipient (beneficiary) of good deeds
as an undesirable role may not apply to collective views
of World War 2, an instance where typecasting theory
was confirmed. The recipient role was strongly and
directly correlated with the victim role across samples,
which in Todorov’s scheme is positively viewed.
Recipient was less strongly correlated with the other
well-intentioned role, the hero. It was also negatively
correlated with the villain role. This suggests that the
recipient is partly seen as a passive patient of moral acts,
in line with moral typecasting theory, but also sympa-
thetic, correlated with other desirable roles in line with
the evaluatively based predictions of narrative theory.
Limitations of method
Samples. Our decision to focus on university studentsamples was partly out of convenience, and partly a con-
scious decision to look at a relatively more educated
subset of a generation whose parents likely had no direct
experience of the war—increasing the likelihood of basicknowledge about the war, while ensuring a personal
remoteness from its events. There were some demo-
graphic differences between samples. Students had dif-
ferent topics of study, and two non-student Internet
samples were collected. Our analyses showed only minor
differences between comparable samples within the same
nation, overshadowed by the idiosyncratic, national
shape of their moral views of the war. We thus think it
likely that these national differences would persist, with
minor variation, in any reasonably knowledgeable sam-
ple. Other differences among our samples, however, such
as gender composition and completion rate, argue for
further replication of these findings with better control
for these variables. In particular the differences in com-
pletion rate may be attributed to different motivation
levels of participants at different sites, differences in
knowledge of the issues, or procedural differences such
as whether questionnaire completion was proctored or
not.
Although it was not feasible to collect samples from
all nations involved in the European war, we believe that
the principal participants in terms of population and mil-
itary might are well represented. Still, contemporary
views from the war’s neutral nations (e.g. Switzerland,
Sweden, Turkey, Spain) might be interesting to collect.
The war in Asia would also be an interesting topic to
study among contemporary generations in China, Korea,
Japan, Philippines, and other countries that took part.
Japan’s role in the war and the complex process of
acknowledging its brutal legacy still has the potential to
stir conflict in the region (Togo, 2013).
Items. Our set of target countries, representing thelarger forces in the European theatre (and Japan),
showed a few omissions when compared to the answers
generated in free responses. Many people spontaneously
listed the Jewish people as a victim of the war. Other
subgroups victimized by Nazis, and sometimes groups
such as the Serbian Chetniks (monarchist guerrillas) or
the category of “civilians,” were listed less frequently.
Moreover, the nomination of individuals leads to further
questions about how countries represent the moral roles
of national leaders (e.g., Hitler), collaborators (e.g.,
© 2020 Asian Association of Social Psychology and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.
Second World War moral roles 13
Petain), resisters (e.g., Schindler), and martyrs (e.g., the
French Resistance fighter Jean Moulin). One interesting
and wholly understandable observation about leaders
versus peoples is that Stalin, when mentioned, was
always in the role of a villain, whereas both hero and
victim roles were given to the USSR as a whole rather
than its leader. Turning to the selection of moral roles,
although our list was based on theory, the clearest results
were found among the trio of Hero, Villain, and Victim.
The Recipient role was less distinct from Victim, as the
two generally rose or fell together on a national level.
Further applications
Our findings can support further demonstrations of how
World War 2’s rhetorical shadow is still cast over con-
temporary issues. Following the example of Gilovich
(1981), archival or experimental research could study the
effects of metaphors involving the war on political atti-
tudes. For example, some see the failure to appease
Hitler as an eternally justifying case for military inter-
vention in any situation. Both US Bush administrations
frequently compared Saddam Hussein to Hitler, with
explicit analogies to his expansionism, prior to waging
war on his regime. These arguments depended on the
typecasting of Saddam as a Hitlerian villain and by
extension, those who would wage war against him as
heroes like the Allies (Noon, 2004). Evidence supporting
this wider point comes from a multinational survey that
implicated nation-level heroic and moralizing representa-
tions of the two World Wars in legitimizing support for
further wars (Bobowik et al., 2014).
There are many other political issues to which the
moral lessons of World War 2 have been applied. The
“spirit of the Blitz” in World War 2 has been used to
bolster national unity in Britain (e.g., after the 2011
riots; Kelsey, 2015). However, in France the moral les-
son of the war may be more divisive, reinforcing the
need to distinguish between the “deux France” of resis-
ters and collaborators (Geisser, 2019). Indeed, recent
studies show quite different consequences for social atti-
tudes of reminding French people of their country’s
heroic, versus villainous, role in World War 2; for exam-
ple, narratives of historical continuity with the
Resistance, versus with collaborators, bolster support for
civil disobedience (Maoulida, Tavani, & Urdapilleta, in
press). In the context of Brexit, the war figures both in
support of European unity (by painting all nations in
some way as victims, underlining the need to prevent
future strife) and in support of Euroscepticism (by draw-
ing on heroic wartime images of Britain alone and on
distrust of Germany; Spiering, 2014; Wellings, 2010).
Such examples illustrate the point that widely shared
representations of the Second World War can be
mobilized to support different group perspectives both
across and within countries (Hilton & Liu, 2017).
The assignment of moral roles should also be exam-
ined in other conflicts. One key question is whether
World War 2 is today particularly moralized compared
to, for example, World War 1, the main lesson of which
seems to be tragic rather than heroic (i.e., national losses
in World War 1 compared to World War 2 are more
influential upon a present-day sense of collective victim-
hood; Bouchat et al., 2017). Colonial and post-colonial
conflicts—the Boer War for the British, Vietnam for theFrench and U.S.—also carry moral lessons today that arecharacterized by disagreement about whether the nation
acted heroically or as a villain. The evolution of views
over time is also of interest; World War 1 was strongly
moralized by contemporary British and US propaganda,
but today the struggle against the Kaiser has lost moral
bite in the shadow of Hitler’s far more vicious example.
In conclusion, we believe the framework of moral
roles to be useful in studying both consensus and vari-
ability in popular ideas about history and conflict.
Conducted in the approach to 75th anniversaries of the
war’s events, our research has shown young people at a
far generational remove from the war still maintaining
clear ideas about the heroes, villains and victims of the
war. Media, education, and commemoration all deserve
to be examined as routes of transmission. Research in
cognitive and social psychology suggests how, for indi-
viduals and societies, multiple retransmissions of a nar-
rative can simplify a complex situation into a story that
follows familiar rules (Schacter, 1995) of which a moral
arc is surely one. Countries also differ in their own self-
image about their role in the war, which could provide
the grounds for further investigation into history’s input
into national charters and national identification. Finally,
the differences between these findings and individual-
level findings in moral typecasting indicate the impor-
tance of considering how narratives about collective
identities might be constructed from different actors,
such as civilians, leaders, and soldiers.
Acknowledgements
We thank Anna Brown, Mathilde Poizat-Amar, and
Giovanni Travaglino for assistance in translation. This
research was enabled and facilitated by meetings spon-
sored by European Union COST action IS 1205, “Social
psychological dynamics of historical representations in
the enlarged European Union.”
Conflicts of interest
The authors declare that there are no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
© 2020 Asian Association of Social Psychology and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.
14 Roger Giner-Sorolla et al.
Author contributions
RGS, DH, and HPE developed initial ideas and the questionnaire. All
authors organized translation, data collection and entry at their sites.
RGS principally wrote and revised the manuscript with input and con-
tributions from the other authors.
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are avail-
able from the corresponding author, Roger Giner-Sorolla
([email protected]), upon request.
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